Ever since they set foot on Ukrainian soil last year, Russian forces have been met with failure after failure after failure.
And despite the monumental effort by its sprawling propaganda apparatus to paint as rosy a picture as possible, there's no masking Russia's massive losses.
Depending on who you ask, Russia has suffered 100,000-200,000 casualties. And roughly a million people have fled the country to avoid being called into the killing fields.
The troops that remain are untrained, ill-equipped, and absent of will.
It's a skeleton force both literally and figuratively.
Strategically, the Russian army was forced to abandon its assault on Kyiv almost as soon as it started.
From there, it was chased back across the Dnieper River as Ukraine reclaimed key the urban centers of Kharkiv and Kherson.
That was back in November, before a lull in fighting over the winter.
As winter gave way to spring, Russia launched a counter-offensive that fizzled out so fast even the country's state-run media wasn't sure it'd actually happened.
The most intense fighting centered on a city called Bakhmut. It doesn't have much strategic value, but Russia was desperate for a win.
It didn't get one.
The Wagner Group, a group of private mercenaries drawn from Russia's prison population, attacked the city in waves, but the Ukrainian forces held on.
This led to a very ugly rift in which the group's commander, Yevgeny Prigozhin, accused the Russian government of sabotaging his unit.
He accused the Kremlin of withholding information, weapons, and ammunition. And if Western intelligence is accurate, he may have offered to reveal Russian troop locations in exchange for a Ukrainian retreat.
Leaked classified documents also suggested Prigozhin held phone calls and meetings with Ukrainian intelligence officers, discussing Russia's ammunition shortages and urging harder strikes against Russian troops.
The disunity is telling.